What does it take to care for strangers? Amrith's ethnographic account of the lives of Filipino nurses in Singapore provides an understanding of migrant care workers’ subjectivities while negotiating their individualities and positions within their migration journeys. The book explores the interactions between the Filipino/a nurses and their Singaporean patients and wards, the construction of their image as professionals vis-à-vis the stereotyped image of Filipino migrants in Singapore as domestic workers, the ambivalences and anxieties they experience given the host society's expectations of a nurse as a care worker, and how they maintain their ties to the homeland through the mediation of technology and place making.

An important start is to understand the immigration context in Singapore, which is premised on a very hierarchical categorization of migrants based on their earning salaries. Types P, Q, and S are granted to mid-level skilled workers and above, while R (or work permit) is specifically issued to migrant workers with technical education and skills qualification, and whose monthly basic salary is not more than S$2,000.Footnote ¹ Migrant nurses are able to enter the country with an S pass, while domestic workers and other low-skilled migrants are given the R work permit, which have restrictions on the length of stay and change of employer, and imposes deportation upon getting pregnant. Thus, the acquisition of a type of visa tends to create segregations amongst immigrants even from the same racial group, as visa type dictates the range of liberties individual migrants can enjoy in Singapore.

This class categorization of immigrants is reinforced in the Filipino migrants’ treatment of each other, as emphasized in the book. This discrimination is deep-seated in the traditional images of a care worker and the host society's perception of nursing work, which is often associated with the characterizations of domestic servanthood (as katulong or domestic worker). In the Philippines, nurses occupy a respected position within the professional sector, while domestic helpers often have lower educational attainment and lack formal training, and are in the informal sector. In chapter 4, “Just Carers: Understandings of Medical Labour”, the narratives reflect that this ambivalence in the role of the nurse as a care worker often creates anxiety in the Filipino nurse, who strives to legitimize her being a “professional” and not “just” a care worker. These anxieties are exemplified by nurses overtly distancing themselves from compatriot domestic workers, not sharing the same public spaces where the latter normally go on their days off, and not associating with the political activism in which domestic workers were quite active in Singapore.

Despite their status and privileges,Footnote ² Filipino nurses in Singapore are often confronted with a restlessness to move. Aguilar likens the migration journey of most Filipino workers to that of a “secular pilgrimage,” where in the process of migrating, “the sense of place”, as is exactly stated by Anguilar, “has no fixity”, and it is a continuous negotiation of their position within the structural organization of the host societies that tends to render them invisible.Footnote ³ Meanwhile in chapter 3, “Migrant Imaginaries and the Act of Leaving,” Amrith echoes this constant act of leaving as part of the Filipino migrant's migration project, and how the nursing system, education, and environment in the Philippines nurture aspirations of working abroad, and is continuously shaped by expectations of families and friends, and media images of a “successful” migrant.

This restlessness is further examined when the author accompanied her Filipino nurse contact on one homecoming trip to Panay, in the central Philippines. In chapter 7, “The Elusive Search for Home,” she describes the climactic confrontation in homecoming (or balikbayan), when the Filipino migrant realizes that their nostalgia of home has not caught up with the changes that have occurred in their absence. Coming home reminds them of the reasons why they left in the first place, and finds themselves in a constant act of doing than being.Footnote ⁴

The sentiment that Singapore is a mere transit city was often reiterated as part of the Filipino migrants’ larger migration project, but to what extent did Singapore's highly selective and restrictive immigration policies (de)motivate the Filipino nurses to explore and exploit the possibilities for permanent settlement? The perceived ease with which Filipino nurses adjust in Singapore is often associated with the familiarity of Singapore as an Asian country, its proximity to the Philippines, ease of communication, and its multicultural society, among others. However, the “otherness” of Singapore comes out in the daily encounters of Filipino nurses as they are treated not as Chinese, Malaysian, or Indian (CMIO), but relegated in the indicative “Others,” which lumps together all other nationalities within the CMIO racial categories in Singapore. It seems that the politics of citizenship remains a highly debated issue despite the multicultural nature of the host society.

In reading the book's narratives of Filipino nurses, accounts of what makes their migrant lives as care workers any different from other Filipino migrant workers seem to be a bit lacking. Chapter 5, “Caring for Others” describes the interactions of a Filipino nurse with selected elderly wards in a Buddhist nursing home, but perhaps due to the limits imposed by the institution, somehow fails to capture the nuances in the meanings and concepts of care held by the Filipino care provider and the Singaporean care recipient. Given the differences in culture and social expectations, how do Filipino nurses adjust their conceptions of proper care to their Singaporean wards? When asked to do work that in the Philippines is relegated to the family or bantay (guardian), such as transferring the patient and changing a soiled diaper, how do they, as professional nurses, adjust their previously held notions of care work and effective care? Conversely, how do the Singaporean patients view the kind of care provided by Filipinos, as compared with other migrant care workers?

Perhaps the book could have also included a deeper discussion on the commodification of care labor and how this is manifested in the experience of the Filipino nurses. The lives and experiences of many Filipino migrants share a common characteristic in that they are all part of a wider kinship system that cares for each other. Their identities as care workers only go as far as when they don their uniforms in their places of work, but at home, they perform different roles, that of a daughter, mother, sister, wife, all of which are bound by familial ties and a sense of caring responsibility to one's blood relations. How they manage to extend this caring self to non-relatives and non-Filipinos looks beyond what it means to be Filipino, Singaporean, or Asian, but is largely informed by their conceptions of care and care work. Is their decision to become a nurse or care worker simply a means to achieve their larger migration projects, or do they find it as an extension of their caring selves thrust into an opportunity to migrate?

Also, a demographic description of the Filipino nurses, such as age, gender, civil status, presence of children, social background, and other characteristics would have likely enlightened the understanding of their desires and motivations to migrate and perform care work. Another, but perhaps a smaller point, is the definition of “medical workers,” which throughout the book has referred only to Filipino nurses. The term encompasses a wide range of diverse medical professions, such as doctors, who may have a slightly different experience of care work from nurses.

Overall, Amrith's book provides a valuable anthropological reading of contemporary Filipino migration, especially that within the Asian context. As most studies of Filipino migration have been done on the movement of female domestic workers and nurses from the south to the north, this book contributes to the understanding of the dynamics of care worker migration within Asia, and underlines the shared similarities and differences of the migration experience of Filipino workers all over the globe.